A Future Lost

Like any act of homicide, abortion steals from its victims their future life.

Page Summary:

Killing is one of the worst crimes because of the impact it has on the victim. Killing deprives the victim of life. The loss of life is the greatest possible loss anyone can suffer because it deprives us of all the experiences and enjoyments that otherwise would have been part of our futures, which we now value or would have come to value. If the loss of our valuable future is what makes killing you and me wrong, then abortion is equally wrong, because it deprives the fetus of its “future like ours”.

Both pro-lifers
and pro-choicers make claims about their positions that they take to be quite
obvious and sufficient for establishing abortion as either an immoral or a
moral practice. On the one side, pro-lifers claim that human life begins at
conception. Since this can be established scientifically by looking at the
number of chromosomes present in a fertilized egg, it is enough for the
pro-lifer to conclude that abortion (at any stage of pregnancy) is morally akin
to murder. On the other side, pro-choicers claim that fetuses are quite
obviously not persons. Since fetuses lack certain psychological properties of personhood
(e.g., reason, mentation, consciousness, self-awareness, etc.), it is enough for the
pro-choicer to conclude that most abortions (esp. early ones) are not wrongful
killings. Generally speaking then, each side wants to utilize a governing moral
principle that will allow for its particular position to stand as correct.

Upon examining
the respective positions, we find that both make a similar move
and suffer from a similar difficulty. When pro-lifers claim, “it is wrong to
kill an innocent human being,” they utilize a biological category to establish
their moral standpoint. That is, invoking the biological category of “human
being” in reference to the fetus is enough to establish that abortion is
morally wrong. When pro-choicers claim, “it is only wrong to kill persons,
rational beings, beings with a developed brain stem, etc.,” they utilize a
psychological category to establish their moral standpoint. That is, the
category of “personhood” understood by way of psychological criteria does the
job of establishing that most abortions are not immoral. The difficulty comes
when either side attempts to defend why their category should make the moral
difference. Both seem to rely on circular reasoning, assuming their conclusion
in the premise. For example, why should I not kill a human being? …because all
human life is morally valuable. Or, why should I not kill a person? …because
being a person (with the capacity to reason, feel pain, etc.) is what gives an
individual moral worth. Both sides believe their preferred category to be
sufficient by itself to establish their claim about abortion.

Don
Marquis, a philosophy professor from Kansas University, wrote an article
entitled “Why Abortion is Immoral,” published in The Journal of Philosophy, proposing a way to avoid the
above difficulties. Instead of basing the morality of abortion on either of the
above categories, he suggested that we address abortion within the larger
discussion of the ethics of killing. That is, before we make any moral
decisions about abortion, we should ask: what makes killing wrong in the first
place? According to Marquis, killing is not wrong because it shows the killer
to be barbaric nor because it leaves friends and relatives left behind
saddened. Rather, killing is wrong primarily because of the effect it has on
the victim. Killing deprives the victim of life. The
loss of one’s life is the greatest possible loss anyone can suffer. It
“deprives one of all the experiences, activities, projects, and enjoyments that
would otherwise have constituted one’s future.” It is not merely changing the
biological state of a victim from alive to dead that it is wrong, but the
effect of that change on the victim’s future, which forever is taken away. In
Marquis’ own words: “When I am killed, I am deprived both of what I now value
which would have been part of my future personal life, but also what I would
come to value.” His conclusion: what makes killing any adult human being wrong
is “the loss of his or her future.”

Marquis
adds that this explanation for the wrongness of killing should be preferred if
it fits with our natural intuitions about killing and if there is no other
better explanation. In addition, he finds his explanation to be supported by
several considerations: (1) it explains why many regard killing as one of the
worst crimes (i.e., killing is regarded as so horrible because of the great
loss it causes); (2) it is incompatible with the view that it is only wrong to
kill beings that are biologically human (i.e., it would be wrong to kill any
being with a valuable future, like aliens and some animals); (3) it does not
necessarily entail that euthanasia is wrong (since those who face an incurable
future of pain would not lose a future of value); and (4) it accounts for the
wrongness of killing newborns and infants (since they indeed have futures of
value like adults).

Thus, if the primary reason for the wrongness of
killing is that it deprives one of his or her future, then this has obvious
implications for abortion. Every normal fetus, just like you or me, has “a set
of experiences, projects, activities, and such which are identical with the
futures of adult human beings and are identical with the futures of young
children.” Since fetuses have a “future like ours,” then it follows that
abortion is a serious moral wrong. Thus, it is not the category of “being
human” or “being a person” that ultimately makes the moral difference in
abortion, but the category of having “future like ours.” Just as it would be
wrong to arbitrarily kill someone like you or me, since we have valuable
futures full of a variety of experiences and enjoyments, it is equally wrong to
kill fetuses, because they also have valuable futures. Lastly, under this
theory abortion could only be justified if another life (e.g., the life of the
mother) was threatened by not aborting.